Wind and solar power are the predominant new sources of electrical power in recent years. Solar power reached a milestone of providing 50% of demand in Germany during one hour in 2012, and wind power during one hour in 2015 exceeded 140% of demand in Denmark. By their very nature, wind and solar power, as well as hydro, tidal, wave and other renewable forms of generation are dependent on weather and climate. Modelling and measurement for resource assessment, site selection, long-term and short term variability analysis and operational forecasting for horizons ranging from minutes to decades are of paramount importance.

The success of wind power means that wind turbines are increasingly put in sites with complex terrain or forests, with towers extending beyond the strict logarithmic profile, and in offshore regions that are difficult to model and measure.

Major challenges for solar power are notably accurate measurements and the short-term prediction of the spatiotemporal evolution of the effects of cloud field and aerosols.

For both solar and wind power, the integration of large amounts of renewable energy into the grid is another critical research problem due to the uncertainties linked to their forecast and to patterns of their spatiotemporal variabilities.
Of particular interest these days is the relatively new field of urban meteorology applied to the renewable energy sector. There are several “Smart Cities” and “Smart Grids” projects in Europe focusing on urban measurement development for forecasts or high resolution resource mapping.

Geographic information systems are well established tools for the identification of potentials and the selection of optimal locations for installing renewable energies. A high and increasing number of studies present indicators of resource availability such as the amount of available biomass, average wind speed, cumulated solar radiation and soil temperature. These studies range from the determination of merely theoretical resources potentials to combined technical, economic, environmental and social studies of the suitability of energy generation technologies (e.g. wind parks, photovoltaic installations and biogas/biomass facilities) and they have reached high spatial detail. However, the consideration of the temporal variability of the energy demand and of highly fluctuating sources, such as wind and solar radiation, is a fundamental element that has been addressed only marginally in GIS-based approaches. The consideration of these fluctuations is paramount to evaluating and designing spatially distributed energy systems with a high share of renewable sources.

We invite contributions on all following aspects of weather dependent renewable power generation:

• Wind conditions (both resources and loads) on short and long time scales for wind power development, especially in complex environments (e.g. mountains, forests, coastal or urban).
• Long term analysis of inter-annual variability of solar resource
• Typical Meteorological Year and probability of exceedance for wind and solar power development,
• Wind and solar resource and atlases.
• Wake effect models and measurements, especially for large wind farms and offshore.
• Performance and uncertainties of forecasts of renewable power at different time horizons and in different external conditions.
• Forecast of extreme wind events and wind ramps.
• Local, regional and global impacts of renewable energy power plants or of large-scale integration.
• Dedicated wind measurement techniques (SODARS, LIDARS, UAVs etc.).
• Dedicated solar measurement techniques (pyranometric sensors, sun-photometer, ceilometer, fish-eye cameras, etc.) from ground-based and space-borne remote sensing.
• Tools for urban area renewable energy supply strategic planning and control.
• dimension distributed renewable energy systems such as virtual power plants
• analyse interaction and proportions of renewable energy power plants in distributed renewable energy systems
• calculate peak load offsetting and/or output variability reduction alternatives for grid connected and off-grid renewable energy systems
• size and locate decentralized storage facilities
• plan multicarrier systems (heat-electricity, heat-cooling-electricity).